Digital video streams typically represent video using a sequence of frames. Each frame can include a number of blocks, which in turn may contain information describing the value of color, brightness or other attributes for pixels. The amount of data in a typical video stream is large, and transmission and storage of video can use significant computing or communications resources. Various approaches have been proposed to reduce the amount of data in video streams, including compression and other encoding techniques. Certain of these techniques use reference frames or portions of reference frames to generate differences between the reference and the frame being encoded. The differences can generally be encoded with fewer bits than the original frame.